April 19, 2012

This semester my Interactive Media Workshop is working with the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events to develop interactive placemaking probes for the City's 2012 Cultural Plan initiative. Three student teams in the class were asked to design interactive interventions, which will allow the common citizen to express their point of view about culture and engage with other citizens, both synchronously in place and asynchronously. The teams have conducted research, conceived, prototyped, and implemented three different interactive prototypes located in cultural hubs around selected neighborhoods - one at the Old Town School of Folk Music, another in Pilsen/National Museum of Mexican Art, and the third at Chicago's City Hall. Over the next two weeks, the teams will monitor interaction to capture user information at these hubs.

If you are in Chicago, please visit these sites and see the high quality installations that ID students have completed for the city and add to the research by participating. Here are some photos of the projects being set up/launching.

Note: PUSH is a mobile installation that is moving around the city. There will be an exhibit/event at the National Museum of Mexican Art when the devices come back - more information about this will be posted soon.

April 12, 2012

Francesca Passoni and Cristina Cook's project, GoKey, completed as part of Prof. Martin Thaler's Product Design Workshop in Fall 2011 has been featured on FastCo Design. They launched their project on Kickstarter this week and are looking to garner $10000 worth of support.

April 06, 2012

By now, you must have seen Google's Project Glass video showing the future of wearable AR technology. As expected the blogosphere is abuzz with excitement, scepticism, and mockery of the concept. Some are even calling Nokia one of the first in augmented reality glasses, take this Giz post for example - "I Liked The Google Glasses Video Better In 2009 When Nokia Made It". Wearable AR has been around for many many years. See this Atlantic article which talks about MIT Media Lab technology that is 13 years old showing wearables. In fact the cyborg Steve Mann [who I have seen in person in 2002] has been wearing AR glasses for years before Nokia or Google envisioned it. ID Professor Tom MacTavish remembers a time when he met Steve Mann at a conference - once he recognised who Tom was, he pulled out a log of the last time they had met, using that as a way to start the conversation. Tom felt unequipped to match this sort of augmentation of human memory!

What makes Project Glass [the right way to say it] compelling is that it uses mature voice recognition technology, real location based prompts, and contextual computing to describe its concept. This is no longer science fiction, nor does it reside purely in engineering labs' future vision videos. This is real technology that will be on the street soon. Google co-founder Sergey Brin was seen wearing one of these at a recent event. Sure Google may mess it up, maybe their actual product may not be that compelling. But by doing it first, Google paves the way for future designers and engineers to come up with technology that will work. Wearables is where AR will shine in the future, and Google is on the right path...

March 30, 2012

A team of IIT Institute of Design graduate students (David Kodinsky, Tuduyen Annie Nguyen, Will Skelton, Parminder Kaur, Yu Yin) recently had their research paper accepted to the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2012). DIS is a premier arena for designers, artists, psychologists, user experience researchers, systems engineers to come together, debate, and shape the future of interactive systems design and practice. As part of my Fall 2011 Communication Design Workshop, and supported by Santosh Basapur at Motorola Mobility, this student team designed and prototyped a public interactive installation at the Design Research Conference 2011 to explore the use of gaming in encourage philanthropic giving. The accepted paper was peer reviewed; out of 449 papers submitted, only 89 were accepted in a double blind review (less than 20%).

David Kodinsky (who starts at IA Collaborative this Fall), and Tuduyen Annie Nguyen will be presenting the paper at DIS2012 in June at Newcastle, UK. Please join us if you are planning to attend the conference.

March 23, 2012

In December 2011, nine students from the IIT Institute of Design traveled to India on a three week program organized by ID and Godrej&Boyce Ltd. During these three weeks, they worked on a strategic project with nine executives and the VP of Innovation from Godrej&Boyce. They were part of new pilot program at ID called the India Immersion Program.

On Tuesday, March 20, 2012, join the presentation and discussion as Navroze Godrej, the students from the India Immersion Program, and I talked about our experiences during this program as well as the effect of this program on ID and future Immersion programs at ID.

March 09, 2012

This semester my workshop is working with the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) to help with the planning of the City's 2012 Cultural Plan. The 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan will provide insights on how to elevate the City as a global destination for creativity, innovation and excellence in the arts. The focus of the project will be to further build on Chicago’s vast cultural assets and vibrant community, established through the collaborative partnerships formed with the public and private sectors and civic community. Public engagement will play a key role in shaping Chicago’s cultural future.

Three student teams from the workshop will conduct user research, design, and deploy three placemaking prototypes in cultural hubs in selected neighborhoods, one at the Old Town School of Folk Music, another at the National Museum of Mexican Art/Pilsen neighbourhood, and the third at City Hall. The teams will deploy these prototypes in April-May, 2012 as well as monitor the prototypes to capture user information at these hubs. At the end of the project, these experiential located and portable prototypes will help DCASE augment traditional forms of research by listening to the voice of a larger diversity of Chicagoans as they move through their everyday lives.

Here are some pics from the mid term review of these prototypes. Keep in mind that these are still works in progress, and may or may not resemble the final installs. In these pictures you can see Jewel Malone, the Deputy Commissioner of Cultural Affairs; Julie Burros the Director of Cultural Planning; Ann Hickey, Director of Program Development; and Juana Guzman, the Vice President of the National Museum of Mexican Art.

February 10, 2012

Zahra Tashakorinia and Derek Tarnow, two students at the IIT Institute of Design designed an accessory for the iPhone called TidyTilt in Prof. Martin Thaler's workshop. One the requirements of the workshop was that students post their designs on Kickstarter for funding. So they did...Zahra and Derek asked for a modest $10,000 to start working on their product. Never in their wildest dreams would they have imagined what happened next.

On January 29, their Kickstarter venture hit $223,174 - that's 2232% more than the initial request. Clearly this is an indicator of what good design (TidyTilt) can do when applied on a great platform (Kickstarter).

Widly successful, both Zahra and Derek are now in production mode for TidyTilt. Congratulations Zahra and Derek!

February 08, 2012

On Saturday, Feb 4 I lectured at Gensler's North Central Partner Retreat at the Lodge in McDonald's Oak Brook campus. The topic of the session was Intelligent Cities. I followed Susan Piedmont-Palladino, Professor at VirginiaTech's Alexandria Center in DC and curator at the National Building Museum. Susan leads the Intelligent Cities initiative at the NBM.

The lecture was based on the work at IIT ID around Interactive Placemaking; it was followed by some energetic Q&A and a discussion between Susan and I.

September 20, 2011

Creationstorming is a method conjured up by Teague Labs that contrasts with open Brainstorming. Its is a mechanism by which teams can quickly come up with ideas around very specific topic area. The key word here is QUICK!

One of the things I like about Creationstorming are the rules:

1. There are bad ideas.It’s okay to disagree with an idea. Encourage critical debate: challenge others, defend yourself. Wild ideas are welcome, but be prepared to back them up.

2. One idea to rule them all.Keep the focus on building one solid idea that progresses. Ideas can fork and merge, but don’t lose sight of the goal for the session.

3. Time is short. Think fast, talk faster.Sessions should be kept as short as possible, so be on your toes and be concise. Interrupt long-winded digressions to keep things on track.

Martin Thaler, my officemate and Associate Professor at ID, calls it 'focused brainstorms', suggesting that free for all brainstorms sometimes lead nowhere!